THE CHOCOLATE-SHEET-CAKE SPATULA
"Her recipe came from a church cookbook and called for only pantry ingredients. No buttermilk? No problem, just add vinegar to milk.”
When I was growing up, our house was strewn with branded items from companies my parents’ funeral home did business with: Batesville Casket pens, Dodge chemicals notebooks, Avon cosmetics totes (Mom cosmetized bodies with the same kind of makeup she wore). This spatula came from the gas station where we fueled up the hearse, and boy was it used. On Amazon it’s called a brownie spatula, sometimes a dessert server, but for me it will always be a chocolate-sheet-cake spatula. It must be 40 years old now, a 2" x 2" shovel engraved with tiny lettering: Compliments Calmar Oil Co.
It’s the perfect size for a modest portion of cake. But we weren’t modest eaters; we were Iowans who put marshmallows in salads. My siblings and I would scarf a 2" x 2" square of cake before sitting down to lunch, swivel around for seconds before we even reached the table, then return seven times that afternoon for spatula-sliced slivers. Only Mom ate cake while seated—and stopped at a single piece, her discipline with calories always stronger than with nicotine. “You could leave some for tomorrow,” she’d suggest. “No need to finish it today.” But that’s exactly why she made sheet cake: It was big enough for us gluttons.
She’d grown up on a farm where women baked and children were told what to do. Her parents spent money on the farm, not on the kids; to read a book, she had to go to the neighbors’. With her own home and family, Mom did things differently. Except for baking, she deliberately departed from the way she was raised. She permitted a bit of indulgence and invested in her kids; no matter how tight money was, we always ordered books from the Scholastic flyer. When I sought advice, her signature response was, “That’s your decision.” Oh, how that frustrated me! And how grateful am I now!
Her chocolate-cake recipe came from a church cookbook (a cafeteria Catholic, she supported birth control and abortion rights while holding firmly to the sacraments) and called for only pantry ingredients. No buttermilk? No problem, just add vinegar to milk. She never used all the frosting and would put the extra in a Tupperware on the second shelf of the fridge; who knew when one of us might want some on graham crackers? Several years ago, I found six Tupperwares of rock-hard frosting on that shelf. “Mother!” I chided. “Look at this!” She just shrugged, smiled and lifted her mug. “Could you get your mother some coffee?”
She was unflappable. In her twenties, she’d owned a successful beauty salon but pivoted to cosmetizing bodies when she was dating my dad. (Offended by how bad the bodies at his family’s funeral home looked—his mother had been doing the work—she offered to give it a shot. I think that’s why he proposed.) She loved sex (at least until menopause), cigarettes, roses and a spotless house, and she took pride in making dead people look good. But none of those things gave her the joy that the noise and chaos of her five kids and nine grandkids did.
By the time Mom’s lung cancer was diagnosed, it had run amok; she would live only five more weeks. Her deathbed was a hastily bought power-lift recliner in the living room. She used the lift function for three weeks and after that remained reclined. Sometime in week three, she started giving away possessions that had brought her delight. The car she’d recently purchased with a surprise inheritance from her brother went to my brother’s wife, Mom signing over the title as the ambulance waited to take her for a dose of fentanyl one night when the pain was too much. A couple of antique rings went to my sister and niece.
Me, I beelined to the kitchen, calling over my shoulder, “Mom, I’m taking one of your sheet-cake spatulas. The wooden one. I’ll leave you the other three.” I thought she might still bake again.
—Stephanie French
Stephanie French is a humanitarian aid worker who has lived in various countries in Africa for the past 20 years. She’s writing a memoir exploring how growing up in a funeral home shaped her approach to grief and death, including the death of her first child.
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Just gorgeous. Your mother sounds like my kinda woman! 💜
In tears this so mived me. Thank you forcsharing